Abstract
In the past, we have enjoyed a shared cultural memory and for most of history, people have shared culture and identity within their communities, a common symbolic language, be it religion, mythology, classics, or regional folklore. It is this shared sense of history that allows people to communicate with others, while being aware that everyone has their own cognitive reference in different circles, that we live in different virtual realities, and that social media and platform algorithms only impose a post-truth world on everyone and exist in their own little bubbles. In this consideration, the pandemic period has had a subtle impact on the upbringing of new generations of students, many of whom live and learn online. These memories participate in the construction of identities in time, and perhaps the data within the screen becomes a space for more realistic emotional projections and imagined desires than reality. In the same way, a new culture of avatars is developing among the new generation. Objects, spaces, or bodies are no longer sacred - they can all be joined to each other as modules, as long as the standards and codes are appropriate.
Keywords：Sino Futurism; Diaspora; Media Art; Virtual Ethnography
Through mass media and online society, which have increased the possibilities of contact with homelands and other communities in the world, immigrant groups tend to see themselves not as a minority within the nation-state they live in, but as part of a global diaspora community transcends national borders. New issues such as "Posthumanism, Sino Futurism, Cyborg Anthropology, and Digital Ethnography" have expanded the field of concern in the humanities, constituting a derivation of the theme of dispersion in human society that now has a very different meaning from its previous definition. As a technological conception of identity construction, artistic practice corresponds to another relationship between technology and human beings, how to present human beings tomorrow, how to tell history as a process of observation of the world today, which can be an academically rigorous discipline, or a genealogical archaeological approach, or an artistic or literary expression. For overseas Chinese, "hybridity" seems to be the ultimate means of interpretation in the face of identity and the construction of culture itself. In a sense, however, the term 'hybridity' connotes a layer of impurity, contamination, and mutation. In the recent evolution of globalization, cultural individuals are no longer static or stuck in a certain space; communication and interaction have led to the blurring of boundaries between cultures. In this sense, the blurring of identity boundaries corresponds to a situation of multicultural difference, where multiple identities that are not 'monocultural' are not a multiple choice of multiple monocultures, but rather a recognition that there can be a hybrid corporeal experience of the interweaving of different cultures at the individual level.
In “Bengawan Solo " (2016-21), a sound installation by Wu Qiyu, Shen Samson, and Zhi Ying（吴其育、沈森森、致颖）, presented at the Guangdong Times Museum in 2021, the sound memories of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s are again juxtaposed through the sampling of sounds from three Asian films. The stories from Japan, Hong Kong, and Indonesia are told in different variants, in different political times and social pressures, and in different scenarios, establishing an emotional connection to this 'multiple identity synthesis' of the Sino community. "One Song is very much like another， and the Boat is Always from Afar"（离散之歌）, presents this transnational and trans-domestic norm of marginal identity and diaspora in the same context as "Far Away, the Sea Sings - Intimacy and Labour of Diaspora Communities"（远方，大海在歌唱）, which opened in September 2021 at the Times Art Center (Berlin). The two exhibitions span the Eurasian continent and find an emotional home for people who are torn between going and coming home, between past and future. "One Song is very much like another， and the Boat is Always from Afar"（离散之歌） is one of the larger Diaspora-imagined individual experiences in mainland China in recent years, where the "other" is unable to integrate into the mainstream of society and "spiritual displacement" occurs. It is also an echo of several other art projects around the world that have dealt with the theme of "diaspora" in the past year. curator Shen Bailiang （申舶良）compares "One Song is very much like another， and the Boat is Always from Afar" with his contemporaries in“ Hussein Karajan: Islands” at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Shanghai, which speaks of the complex experience of "hyper-identity" and "Afrofuturism", a fusion of African diaspora culture and technological fantasy. In comparison with the theme of the 7th Athens Biennale, which was seen through the lens of Afrofuturism, the cross-cultural creative lens of the 7th Athens Biennale incorporates the artistic ecology of Southeast Asia into a broader exploration of the future of the Anthropocene.
It is the cultural 'purity' that is seen as a secure identity that allows for the different discriminatory situations encountered by diaspora people around the world, highlighting ethnic differences and visualizing ethnic boundaries in a way that sees the codes that define ethnic boundaries (e.g. skin) as important in the construction of ethnic identity, but which also It also shows the inability to dissolve boundaries. The work “No Man” features fifty avatars from different cultural contexts (created from online digital assets and linked to current popular culture). In the exhibition space, the viewer can walk into this seemingly virtual world and see these animals, human-animal hybrids, cyborg figures, anatomical human bodies, Japanese soldiers, medieval knights, and other symbols of different mythological archetypes, mixed samples of figurative human history (and even cultural stereotypes), gathered in a seemingly "disjointed" movement projected by multiple projectors in the space against a holographic glass matrix. "The chorus of seemingly 'uncoordinated' movements is projected by multiple projectors in a matrix of holographic glass. The notion of hybridity in the work's presentation links to Cyborg's use of anthropocentrism to rethink the relationship between society, culture, and people, attempting to deconstruct the cultural stereotypes inherent in historical narratives and to open a collective identity that has never been unified by language, religious beliefs or political power. These seemingly polysemous and complex references to cultural symbols end up on a global platform of online virtual assets that can be appropriated and combined into open-ended landscapes at will.
In recent years artistic practice has been investigating community concerns in the form of archaeology, often by going back to the site or working with the people involved, this way of being a participant and a witness seems to create a sense of proper interpretation of history, and when the narrative content begins to extend to earlier historical narratives, the computer desktop becomes largely the site where such work unfolds, digital media and new interpretations of memory and history The digital media and the new interpretations of memory and history are a way of experiencing the information collected online, such as artificial intelligence-generated images of people and deep fake techniques, and of examining the authenticity of the information reproduced. The project is also a way of understanding the state of coexistence and conflict between different languages. Influenced by Chinese culture, but with different historical experiences, memories, and identities, these individual cases of artists with different cultures, different mediums of creation, and different observations and insights of their unique places and times seek to connect and construct reflections and revelations on society as individuals and.
The author used text-to-image AI technology as an experimental tool for artistic creation in 2023 to generate realistic images that match the description of the Peranakan among the Chinese Indonesians as a keyword input, with different ages, gender, occupation, etc. describing the given text, although the current AI platform still appears homogeneous for the generation of images, to some extent, the classification and discrimination mechanisms of neural networks are subjectively biased at a moral level, i.e. how the Peranakan as a mixed sub-Chinese ethnic group, as a conceptual look-alike average, becomes recognizable in machine learning. This is, in effect, an offensive move with a traumatic memory in this paper's discussion about the diaspora period of Chinese Indonesians. The 'outsider' certificate issued by the local government to identify ethnic Chinese became part of the identity status of many ethnic Chinese as perpetual 'guests'. However, in terms of the orientation of artistic practice, the aim is mostly to provide an embodied experience, which today's technology may not yet be able to provide, but this new theory of the body and media empathy between human and technological objects is increasingly important in a world where artificially intelligent images are generated in a false sense. Just as the iterations of AI technology will go beyond the identification of features between communities to become an 'other' gaze at humans themselves. The blurring of the boundaries between the Simulacra and the real makes history a more difficult subject to narrate. In Harun Farocki's words, "Today images are producing reality, not reflecting it."
In this sense, the shift in anthropological research practices is used to analyze how future artistic practices will be mediated by the construction of identity as a parent topic. This shift from the practical anthropology of inspection and documentation to the virtual anthropology of online search and discovery is also worthy of attention in the context of media art. The development of the RADICAL AI, for example, has made it possible to reduce the cost of motion capture technology, to extract motion from the images of the video footage itself, and to facilitate the use of artistic practice tools that will allow the creator to pursue a much higher quality of creation itself. This extension of the real world into the virtual realm has become an intermediate area of discussion in the development of technological accelerationism, expanding into various disciplines where the desire for collective experience and the prying into individual privacy are equally debatable, as in the case of the current state of Virtual Reality technology in society, where the user gains access to a collective world by shielding his senses from what is around him. The price of gaining access to a collective space is a kind of everyday life that would have previously been considered science fiction.
As for the discourse on the "other" of the self, the focus on heterogeneous cultures, as demonstrated by the aforementioned Singaporean artist Choy Ka Fai（徐家辉）'s artistic practice of identity construction in recent years, is a more revealing example, as we can discuss in his exhibition project "Cosmic Wander: Expedition" (Cosmic Wander: Expedition, 2021), a work developed as a 3D game prototype, which uses his participation in a nine-day Mazu（妈祖） pilgrimage in Taiwan as a record of the rituals of the deity, as well as the character of the "wanderer", as a manifestation of The game is based on a nine-day Mazu pilgrimage in Taiwan as a record of the rituals of the spirits, and on the character of the Wanderer, who bears witness to the cultures of Taiwan, Vietnam, Siberia, Singapore, and Indonesia. The Cosmic Wanderer series consists of a six-channel video installation that uses the supernatural dance experiences of contemporary shamanic practices in different parts of Asia as a cultural sample and corresponds each region to a natural element such as gold, wood, water, fire, and earth. The live exhibition presents a fictional spiritual band of Asian origin dancing to popular songs and familiar tunes, while this alternative virtual concert intertwines popular culture with speculations on future spirituality, an attempted exploration of alternative states of consciousness in different cultures through technological experimentation and the narrative and imagination of a futuristic view of space-time horizons. And this possible exploration of the coexistence of sacred incarnations based on different cultural backgrounds (what Choy Ka Fai calls lineage) in one spiritual medium is defined as an outsider, encountering accusations of appropriation of other cultures. In his interview, he speaks very frankly about his identity as an insider and outsider at the same time, as an "Asian who entered Asia", and is accused of cultural appropriation. Choy Ka Fai claims to "imagine a new future for the body through the appropriation of technology and narrative, in which the boundaries between the spiritual and the mundane, the virtual and the material, become blurred in order to project a new choreography of the body. "Cosmic Wanderer: The Expedition" seeks to invite the viewer to consider our physical and spiritual state in these strange times. Wandering is important to our human minds and bodies, as a physical experience, a way of discovering the unknown, and through walking the mind will help us to speculate on our past and future selves."
The questioning of cultural 'purity' has been a recurring theme in art practices that focus on the Chinese diaspora, and the experience of intercultural hybridity has been a motivating factor in the artist's work and the premise of his narrative. On the official website of Choy Ka Fai’s latest art project, Cosmic Wander, we can see a continuation of his research into the coexistence of multiple Asian origins, shaping Cosmic Wander as a conceptual travel agency exploring the diversity of Asian ritual culture. It also delves into the conceptual travel agency of Ongon in Siberia (a Buryat-Mongolian cultural hybrid), Nezha in Taiwan (a techno-spiritual medium - electronic music mixed with contemporary Taoist culture), Dao Mau in Vietnam (a gendered fluid spiritual medium), Kuan Yin Kali in Singapore (a Chinese and Indian cultural hybrid), and Dolalak in Indonesia (a Dutch-Javanese cultural hybrid), and a virtual metaverse was created using Ongon in Siberia as a 'Blue Sky Academy' to discuss traditional folk rituals as an extension of modern spiritual practices. as an extension of the discussion of modern spiritual practices, rethinking the connection between the physical and spiritual states of these strange times and ours.
It is further worth pointing out that, in fact, the temporal and spatial orientations corresponding to the structures of everyday life that we experience in our lives are being transferred to the social fact of virtual social life platforms, while providing a function of identification with the cultural specificities of the self as perceived by virtual technological means. Interaction between people on the Internet is no longer just a simple interaction with traditional text or images or sounds, but a full range of physical experiences. Interactions supported by virtual technologies lead to the formation of 'virtual communities'. And while it may sound 'colorful' to understand in relative isolation the self-justifying uniqueness of various ethnic groups in different regions of time and space, there is a sense in which the fundamentalist tendency of ethnic uniqueness is worth considering. Such artistic practices, which can be found in similar experiences among the Indonesian-Chinese diaspora, include Ho Tzu Nyen's No Man, a virtual asset-cultural hybrid landscape, the author's LanFang_Identity(2023), which uses portraits of ambiguous Peranakan as artificial intelligence sampling material, and the cross-cultural interpretation of Choy Ka Fai's Cosmic Wanderer: Expedition (2021), which takes the form of an interactive game of cross-cultural interpretation, intended to discuss the notion of expressive disintegration and extended roaming of immaterial, non-human expression in the digital world. Just as understanding the transformation of trans-Chinese cultural mechanisms of expression is reflected in the dissolution of the possibility of understanding or questioning from any cultural contextual, identity-based perspective. How are the visible and invisible imaginary dimensions approached in today's globalized world? Does the body continue to play the role of a medium that connects our surroundings to the archive of personal/collective memory, or has it been integrated into the digital stream of virtual consciousness? In an accelerationist society where technology seems to reign supreme, the corporeal experience interweaves changing things with spiritual experiences and post-human bodily reflections, aiming to make all viewers the 'other' of the gaze and opening a liminal space in terms of cultural experimentation, making the virtual Ethnography a potential for Intercultural narratives for Identity conception.
REFERENCES
Abidin Kusno, (2016). Visual Cultures of the Ethnic Chinese in Indonesia. Rowman & Littlefield. International Ltd.
Astrid Moller-Olsen, (2020). Data Narrator: Digital Chronotopes in Contemporary Chinese Science. Fiction. Lund University/Sweden,SFRA Review50.2-3,Spring-Summer.
Carmen Herold, (2020). China ‘s Sonic Fictions: Music, Technology, and the Phantasma of a Sinicized Future. Humboldt University of Berlin/Germany, SFRA Review 50.2-3, Spring- Summer.
Chu Feng-yi, (2022). The Absent Southeast Asian Futurism: On the Long Walk. Nusantara Archive. February 16th.
Dino Ge Zhang, (2020). A Diagnosis of Sinofuturism from the Urban-Rural Fringe. RMIT
University/Australia，SFRA Review 50.2-3, Spring-Summer.
Gabriele de Seta, (2020). Sinofuturism as Inverse Orientalism: China’s Future and the Denial of. Coevalness. University of Bergen/Norway, SFRA Review, Spring-Summer.
Virginia L Conn, (2020). Sinofuturism and Chinese Science Fiction: An Introduction to the Alternative. Sinofuturism Special Issue. Rutgers University/USA，SFRA Review50.2-3， Spring-Summer
Virginia L Conn, (2020). Photographesomenonic Sinofuturism(s). Rutgers University/USA ，SFRA. Review50.2-3, Spring-Summer.
Wang, G.W. (2003). MixingMemories and Desires, Keynote Speech given at the Second Conference of. Institute and Libraries for Chinese Overseas Studies. 13-15 March.
Yun, Chang-Yao, (2012). The Identity of Chinese in Contemporary Indonesia, Kwan Hok Publishing Ltd, Taipei, P.161.